Linkbar

Thursday, July 25, 2013

I've got a budding artist on my hands. LM produces no less than 15 new pieces of art a day, and I cannot for the life of me keep up. I've been on the hunt for a long time for a way that I could incorporate her art into our home in a more attractive and purposeful way.

Our previous go-to had been your standard art-hanging-on-the-fridge, art-on-the-walls-with-tape, and art-on-every-flat-surface in my house "display" system. While there is no way this is going to tame the art making MACHINE I have living in my house, it will at least direct focus onto a few pieces at a time so as to give our eyes some place to rest. It's also super easy to change from piece to piece so once school starts and we start getting inundated with projects from TWO kids (yes - Keeku is starting preschool in the fall!) there will already be a manageable system in place.

So . . . onto my super easy solution.

I found 4 of these frames at Meijer marked down 75% off. And they weren't completely beat up and nasty. Unreal. They are about 19x21":

Even though they are pretty square-ish, I wanted to hang them long ways so imagine me flipping this on it's side. :)

I pulled all the matting and frame guts out and replaced them with these napkins from Anthropologie which were just about the right size. Plus, they come in 4 colors. Plus, clearance:

I originally thought I would use bigger binder clips to actually hang the artwork to the hooks, but I found a whole box of these teeny ones in my desk drawer so I just used what I had.

Here's the whole display in action:

Sidebar: The ladder on the left used to belong to Mr. Skooks' uncle back in the day. It was once useful (Mr. Skooks had it at work for awhile), but it came to be known as the "widow maker" among his coworkers because it was getting pretty rickety in its old age. Rather than chuck it, he brought it home one day about a year ago and said, "Maybe we can use this somewhere in the house?" I find this funny only because decorating with ladders has been a trend for awhile now, but Mr. Skooks is not someone who is reading design blogs to keep up with that kind of stuff so it was totally random on his part. To make a long story short we are severely lacking in storage space in our lower level (no coat closet, no linen closet, no buffet with drawers and shelves) so we ended up leaning it in the corner of our dining room to hold all of our table linens.

Anyway, that's my story. You could do this same thing sans Command products. If you wanted to you could just glue your clip right onto the frame. Personally, I like this solution better b.c I know if we ever decide to do something different here, the hooks are easily and cleanly removed and the frames can be kept intact. And no - this is not a sponsored post by Command . . . though it is starting to feel like it should be.

P.S. Something I didn't know about Anthro because I almost never shop there (ogle, yes - purchase, not so much): If you go to their store and rifle through their clearance bin for what you want and they don't have every style right there, they'll order it for your from another store and ship it to your house for free. I could see from their website that my local Anthro only had 2 colors of these napkins, and as such I briefly considered just ordering them all online. It was going to cost $6.95 to ship 4 stupid napkins so I started to rethink my whole idea. Since I was already going to be in the vicinity running other errands, I decided to stop into the store to *make sure for real* that I did, in fact, love them. Of course, I did. Dang that store. So when the Anthro lady came by with her, "Are you finding everything ok?" spiel, I piped up my sadness that they didn't have every color of these napkins. She ordered up the other two for me right quick. That was a nice surprise, since Anthro clearance still feels expensive in my world.

P.P.S. This post was also not sponsored by Anthropologie. Nobody sponsors me to write about jack, which is probably why you haven't heard from me in awhile. Plus - summer's busy y'all! It seems hard to believe that I'll have more time for things when the craziness of school starts back up in the fall, but in my mind I will. And that is now, for real, the end of this post.